The quote is from Bob Hawke sums up how things turned out. There are fifteen seats in a Parliament of 150 that now have to be turned round to return Labor so it is far more than a comfortable win. But it is that the two party preferred ended up at the 53-47 that remains the problem. It is hard to conceive under what circumstances the 47% would not vote the Labor-Green Alliance if they still voted for them now. It is the majority party at all times except when it isn’t. But below 47% it will never go except under the most extraordinary circumstances, circumstances hard to imagine if these were not just the kinds of circumstances that would do it.

Like with Obama, the Labor-Green Alliance is a coalition of the envious and perpetually unsatisfied. Our new Prime Minister, on the other hand, offers a government of reasonable people who will manage our affairs in an orderly and efficient way. They will base their policies on a Judeo-Christian ethic that has dominated the politics of the West. They will provide considered judgments on the issues of the day after due deliberation. Their aim will be to maintain a prosperous and harmonious community. They will attend to the affairs of the nation in ways that reflect a prudential judgment about what can be done with the means we have available. They will not offer the sun, the moon and the stars. And that, my friends, is exactly where the problem lies.

It is the failure to promise the sun, moon and stars that will keep the other side ever unsatisfied. That is what they want, not all of them, of course, but a very large proportion. They don’t even care if it can be delivered. They don’t even care if they do more harm than good trying to do what cannot be done. They are not looking for prudence and common sense. They do not want a government of reasonable people acting in a reasonable way.

What they want from a government is to feel good about themselves. They want to show they are virtuous and moral, not by acting in a virtuous and moral way, but by inventing some impossible standard of righteousness so they can complain bitterly when it is not on offer. And even where parts of it might be delivered, they don’t care because the possible, the deliverable is precisely what they do not want. Anyone can do what can be done.

A government of the right cannot ignore them, but it should be aware that it can also never satisfy them. They will never acknowledge the good you have done because as far as they are concerned, good of itself can never be delivered by anyone who does not display one of the banners of the left. Without a socialist label and an anti-market mindset, it makes no difference because it is not the outcome they seek but the motive and the motive will never be pure of heart and morally correct if it does not come in the name of some version of socialist thought. I despair in having to share a political world with such people but there is no answer to their existence.

My hope is that our new government is a government that will last for at least six year and maybe nine. Heaven would be to repeat John Howard’s eleven. But that they will once again be succeeded by the same kind of visionless visionaries, morality-free moralists, as the kinds of people the Labor Party has been led by over the recent past is inevitable. One can only hope that in the meantime institutional structures can be put in place that will stop them from wrecking the place when their hands are once again on the levers of power as they will one day be again. But in the meantime, a return to some sort of calm and good sense.